The weird is biting back

A history of power vs the "irrational", via Ancient Greek lament, Shakespeare's witches, Freud and Edward Bernays, and the Harris–Walz campaign

News and other bits:

• Thanks for bearing with me in the long gap between posts, and thank you to all those who reached out to check on me. How lovely are you? I’m fine, thank you! But this essay was another live one, starting as a little musing about the films of Adam Curtis and the 2024 US election cycle, and ending up swallowing 2,500 years of history and becoming a thesis about the life-and-death importance of weirdness and of respecting “irrational” forces that extend beyond the human psyche, especially in our present moment. Writing this helped me to figure out a lot of things. I hope you enjoy reading it.

• My habit of thought-sprawl notwithstsanding, I’m excited to find ways to be here more consistently. Finding all of you has been the surprise gift of my 2024, and in 2025 I want to make the very most of this community. So keep your eyes peeled for new offerings in the new year. Speaking of which…

• *Blake reading group alert.* If you were interested in my account of being catapulted to the dark side of the moon while reading William Blake, this one’s for you. In the new year, I’m going to be working with my brilliant teacher Dr. Valentin Gerlier (who facilitated that catapulting) to offer a Blake reading group for subscribers to this Substack. These sessions will be an excellent opportunity to deepen or embark on both an adventure with Blake (an incomparable tour guide to the imaginal realm) and a lectio divina (sacred deep reading) practice. We’re planning a six-week series, on Zoom, and there will be a fee, sum tbd dependent on group size. Valentin’s teaching of Blake and many other things has been a game-changer for me in my exploration of imagination. If this sounds like something you’d like to do, please send an email to ellie@ellierobins.com.

• I’ve got another new piece up at the St. Martin-in-the-Fields Substack. This one’s about music—about how the world itself is sound, and humans are nothing more or less than musical instruments, made to play that sacred sound back to itself.

• Finally, an advance warning that I’m transitioning to using my full name, Eleanor. At a certain point next year, this Substack will change to eleanorrobins.substack.com. I’ll send an email before it happens.

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Goya, Witches’ Flight

Hi, friends,

Are you a bit of a weirdo? I am, and I suspect a lot of us in this nerdy-mystical corner of Substack have this in common. I’ve always been weirdly intense, had weird interests, and kept weird company. Definitely had “weirdo” lobbed at me a fair amount at school. These days, I’m proud to self-identify with the misfits.

So I felt a little, well… weird, when the Harris–Walz campaign went hard on calling Trump “weird” earlier this summer. I felt even weirder a few weeks later when a piece I wrote, about how this moment is calling for us to draw deep on our weirdness, became the most widely shared thing I’d ever published.

How can weirdness be a hard-won badge of honour and a wellspring of hope to some of us, and an insult to others? And which social and power dynamics are warring in the gulf between those meanings? I don’t think these are inconsequential questions. In fact, I think they might hold a key to this cultural and political moment.

Of course, it has now become clear that for the Harris campaign, using “weird” as an insult was a misfire. But it was far from an isolated incident. There is a long, long history of those in power or seeking power belittling, suppressing, and sidelining the non-rational, “weird” parts of the human experience. And when we look at this history, we see a particular dynamic repeating itself, whether in Ancient Greece or Shakespeare’s England or the 2024 US election or the playgrounds so many of us dreaded as kids. It’s a dynamic you could summarize as: “Witches aren’t real, kill the witch.” In other words, an attitude that is at once dismissive and fearful, which uses mockery and disdain to disenfranchise and pathologize powerful forces and the people felt to embody or channel them, while skirting the question of whether there’s any truth or value in what they’re communicating.

I am no Trump supporter; I hope that much is clear. I have no desire to excuse the violence and bigotry he represents and incites. In fact, this is exactly why I am eager for us to get to grips with weirdness and the irrational. Because as long as we keep allowing our authorities and leaders to belittle and pathologize weirdness in all its guises, I believe that irrational forces will keep finding darker and harder ways to bite back. You can’t suppress the weird or the irrational, not really and certainly not forever, because “irrational” is really just another way of saying “existing outside of logic” or even “outside of the intellect’s meaning-making patterns” or even just “unpredictable”—and as far as I can tell, that accounts for most of the world. Human cognition and the phenomena it can grasp account for only a very small portion of the energetic dynamism of this world, let alone the other realms that influence it.

So are our mainstream culture and our ruling classes (not least, please god, the Democrats) going to learn to respect the forces of weirdness? To take them seriously? Or will they keep deriding them, frantically spinning this fiction that we live in a rational universe, and forcing all non-rational energies and appetites into ever darker and more dangerous costumes?

There’s no doubt in my mind that tomorrow will be shaped by the answers to these questions. By what we decide, today, about weirdness: what it is, whether it matters, and if so, why.

So in this essay, I want to present four vignettes. Four little stories of the ways the structures of power in the West have worked to shut out, deride, or manipulate the wild, weird, fundamentally unreasonable and non-rational truth of existence. Four stories that end with that weird, irrational truth howling at the door, louder than ever. (And I’m sure it goes without saying that four vignettes can’t fully trace thousands of years of history, so this will be an incomplete story, though I hope an interesting one.)

This one goes out to all my weirdos.

Which, as I hope will become clear, means everyone.

***

(First, a quick note on the word “weird”. I’m sure most people reading this are aware that it derives from the Anglo-Saxon “wyrd”, meaning something like “fate”. “Fate” is such a facile, overused, sentimentalized word these days that it’s easy to overlook what a powerful idea it actually is. It represents a fundamentally unknowable force that is inextricably entwined with our daily lives—that is moving us through our daily lives, with or without our cooperation. The original use of “wyrd”and then “weird” was tied up with this air of otherworldly mystery and destiny; with the sense that events in this world are determined by something far larger than the human will and human reason. Something that can’t be collapsed into a rational worldview. The fact that this expansive and mysterious quality of lived experience became a playground insult is really a perfect illustration of the dynamic I traced above: that people who are eager to assert their power in the material realm (politicians, school bullies) will often deride and belittle any suggestion of powers beyond their reach. If you were called a weirdo at school, it might well have been because you carried a whiff of the otherworld on you, maybe expressed in a taste for non-mainstream arts or learning that helped you feel a little closer to some bigger truth.

In this essay, I’m mostly using the term “weird” in the former, expansive sense of non-rational, otherworldly, unknowable powers. But I don’t think there’s a clean break between that meaning and the more recent playground-insult inflection of the word. And I think we would all do well to think very carefully about our orientation to spirit and humanity before using “weird” as an insult.)

***

Let’s start where we left off in my last essay, in Athens in around the sixth century BCE. We’re at a graveside, surrounded by women singing. But no, not just singing: wailing. Ululating. Keening. Grieving so loudly and passionately that they might tear a portal between the living and the dead. The lamentation is led by the female family members of the deceased, who are joined by professional mourners—women trained in the ritual art of grieving aloud. This has been the manner of marking death since time immemorial.

But as I mentioned last time, the days of this age-old practice were already numbered. In the sixth century BCE, the Athenian statesman Solon was hard at work developing his statecraft—experiments and theories that would form the basis of the famed first democratic city-state. And a core element of this emerging statecraft was to outlaw lament, because its energies were seen as so raw, so powerful, so effective in rending the threshold between our world and the otherworld, as to threaten the stability of settled civic life. That was no good for the emerging polis, which relied on harmony and sophrosyne, or moderation and soundness of mind. (If you want to learn more about all this, do check out Anne Carson’s terrific essay “The Gender of Sound”, in Glass, Irony, and God, or this essay which discusses it, shared with me by the wonderful Cleo Kearns.) (It is of course no coincidence that the unruly energies that tore a portal to the otherworld and thus threatened the polis were gendered female—but I’ll get to that in a future essay.)

So here, in the very blueprint of the political system under which we still live, we have a fundamental conflict between the weird, the otherworldly, the irrational and unharmonious energies that swirl through our world and indeed through each of us—and the architecture of state. And as we know, the architecture of state would win this conflict, or at least seem to. It would outlaw lament, outcast those wild and weird energies, and before too long, successfully manifest a mind-bogglingly ambitious new political structure whose success depended on sustaining a restrictive, misogynistic fiction of the harmony and reason of social relations and the human position in the world. Athenian democracy itself would only last for a couple of centuries before succumbing to invasion, but that doesn’t mean the idea, the ideology ever went away. It’s dictating the way we live right up to this day.

***

Let’s jump now to 1606, year of the first ever staging of Macbeth. We’re some way into the early modern era now, and England is well on its way toward emerging from the highly ritualized Middle Ages into a new rationalism. But the transition remains tense and uneasy, and the new rationalism often betrays an in fact very irrational loathing of older forms of meaning-making. On the throne sits a new king, James I: a brittle kind of ruler positively fixated on the apparent evils of witchcraft and magic. As King of Scotland, he had been an enthusiastic supporter of witch trials, and in 1597 he published Daemonologie, a tract about black magic in which he endorsed the hunting of witches.

In this atmosphere, wily old Willy Shakespeare stages a new play that opens with three “weird sisters” at centre stage. These weird sisters will go on to conjure visions and cast prophecies that set the play’s disastrous action in motion. And what can they tell us about the status of the weird in 1606? Are these witchy, weird sisters a genuine threat to power and the established order? (Kill the witch.) Or are they simply wayward: outcast and irrelevant women, raving in the wilderness, spitting bile to anyone who’ll listen while the real machinations of power go on elsewhere? (Witches aren’t real.) (Shakespeare’s Globe has a helpful note here about the First Folio’s use of weird/wayward/witch, in case you’re interested.)

As ever, Shakespeare’s genius is in thickening the air with all the possible meanings and weights of the matter at hand, while offering no simple answers. He never forgot that he was writing from a cultural knife edge: an old world disappearing, a new one being born. Here, he looks back to a time still consciously cradled by otherworldly power—because the sisters do, indeed, seem to have true power. After all, each of their prophecies comes true. Macbeth becomes king; Banquo’s descendants are set to succeed to the throne by the end of the play; Birnam Wood marches on Dunsinane; Macbeth is killed by a man not born of a woman.

In the same breath, Shakespeare reflects and anticipates the increasingly humanist bent of English culture, which could and still can all too easily reason away the suggestion of otherworldly and weird power by locating any hint of weirdness inside the human psyche, rather than in the world’s soul. (In this, he anticipated Freud, on whom more soon.) Because though the prophecies come true, they come true by Macbeth’s own hand. It’s Macbeth who seizes the crown by killing the king. It’s Macbeth who brings on his own demise.

Do witches have real power? Are there other realms that can influence our world, and are there individuals who walk between the realms? Or are events on Earth subject only to human reason and reasoning and will? These questions would be central to the century to come, with its many witch murders and, by the century’s end, the dawning Enlightenment: that ultimate enshrining of human reason as the proper guiding force of life on Earth. By the late 1600s, almost a century after this first staging of Macbeth, the dominant consensus would seem to have come down hard on the side of humanism and rationalism—would suggest, indeed, that humanism and reason were the only defence against the tyranny that had subjugated so many for so long under the absolute monarchies of the Middle Ages.

As ever, Shakespeare was ahead of the game, seeing that a wholly rationalist world would forever be a fiction, and likely a dangerous one. After all, Macbeth’s weirdness is not restricted to the weird sisters and their creepy, mesmerizing trochaic tetrameter. Macbeth himself suffers wild and weird visions. Lady Macbeth seems to rationalize and justify the most dangerous and unreasonable of impulses. You can condemn the weird sisters to the wilderness, Shakespeare tells us, but there is no escaping the weirdness of humans or of the air we breathe.

Would that we had listened.

***

Now to Freud, who discovered the irrational in the late nineteenth century. Well done, Sigmund! “Humanity is in the highest degree irrational,” he wrote, “so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments.” For Freud, several hundred years into the modern era and its triumphal humanism and individualism, the irrational was located entirely inside the human psyche. It was nothing more or less than the human unconscious. Where for the Ancient Greeks, the danger of the irrational was that you might rend the boundary between realms and bring unruly spirits to walk among the living, for Freud and his followers, the permeable boundary, the haunting ground, and the ghosts themselves were entirely contained within and generated by the human being and her personal history.

I don’t need to tell you how much these individualist and individually pathologizing ideas have shaped modern culture in the 150 years since. Sure, very few people see a Freudian analyst these days, but we remain a culture that looks at a world on fire and lashed by the weirdest of energies—and prescribes individual therapy. (By the way, if you’re interested in modern therapy’s bizarre individualization and medicalization of wider ills and weirdnesses, there’s nobody better to read than my dear friend Rebecca Hyman.)

But it’s not really Freud I want to talk about here. It’s his nephew, Edward Bernays, the father of modern PR, who would take his eminent uncle’s thoughts about the unconscious and weaponize them. If humans are so powerfully driven by irrational and unconscious urges, Bernays reasoned, it must be possible to manipulate them by appealing to those unconscious appetites. This, he discovered in the United States in the early twentieth century, was a wildly successful way to sell products. Sure, you could sell a car by appealing to reason; by saying it will reliably get you to your destination. But imagine how many more cars you could sell by appealing to people’s deepest, most hidden desires: for freedom, say, or for status or sex.

I don’t need to tell you how successful this little ploy was, either. Though I do always like to return to this quote from future president Herbert Hoover, addressing a bunch of ad men on the eve of the Wall Street crash (ho ho): “You have taken over the job of creating desire, and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.”

Before long, Bernays and his insights were reshaping American democracy itself. In the wake of World War II, with the world still reeling from the mass delusion that had swept through Germany, some people in power came to believe that it was exceptionally dangerous to hand people full democratic rights. Clearly, people were far too irrational, far too susceptible for that. What was needed was a way to preserve the illusion of democracy while actually curbing political participation. What was needed was a distraction, a displacement arena where those irrational unconscious urges could be ceaselessly piqued and sated, piqued and sated, in an ultimately (purportedly) benign cycle, leaving the real arenas of power and consequence untouched. The Bernays brand of consumerism was the perfect candidate for the job. Cue a century and counting of the illusion of democratic choice, in which people’s desire for self-determination is in fact hooked almost entirely to consumer choice.

The Adam Curtis aficionados among you will have clocked that I’m drawing liberally from his documentary series Century of the Self here. But though I’ve followed his arguments up to this point, I want to end this vignette by offering a counterpoint; by pushing against him.

Across his films, Curtis tells a seductively dark story about humanity’s growing entrapment in ideologies and power structures that are too huge and complex for us to comprehend or, often, even notice. He encourages us to question the narratives, ideologies, and systems that invisibly structure and restrict our lives. In Century of the Self, he takes fire at individualism as one of these tacit ideologies.

Curtis’s very dark worldview had a real moment in 2016/17, when the release of HyperNormalisation coincided almost exactly with the catastrophe of Trump’s first election. I was living in the US at the time, and for a while, it seemed like everyone I knew and every podcast host I listened to was diving deep into Curtis. It’s easy to see why so many of us were seduced, at that moment in time, by his picture of modern life as a state of chaos and powerlessness against the crushing might of systems beyond our control.

But in the years since then, I’ve come to see that Curtis himself is standing inside an invisible and restrictive narrative. To take the example of Century of the Self, he doesn’t ever really question Freud’s central supposition that the ground and source of the world’s irrationality, the world’s weirdness is the human psyche. Sure, he spotlights crucial hidden stories from within this paradigm. He helps us to see a century’s worth of nefarious characters and interests that have circumscribed what seems possible in the modern West. But he also presents a world in which there’s no recourse, because there is and can be nothing more powerful than the looming, conglomerating structures humans erect to control other humans.

Well… what if there is something more powerful? What if there was all along? What if that’s why the Ancient Greeks outlawed lament? Because those ancient statesmen knew that any earthly structure they solidified would always be vulnerable, so long as people were fully and truly connected to the wild, weird otherworld, and the ways its currents ran through their own bodies?

***

And so to 2024.

It’s easy to see what Tim Walz meant, what he was trying to do, when he started calling Trump and JD Vance weird. He meant: how creepy that these men are so obsessed with controlling other people’s bodies, with deciding which books children can read, with declaring their political opponents enemies. He meant to highlight the strangeness of this behaviour while also removing its sting, by belittling and ridiculing it.

But this side of the election, it sounds a lot like, “Witches aren’t real. Kill the witch.” It sounds like an Ancient Greek statesman insisting on sophrosyne, on harmony and order in the polis even as unruly forces are rending the realms. It sounds like the political order reassuring us that things will be OK if we can just keep pretending that things already are OK; that what we’ve been doing, the way we’ve been living for the past several centuries or even millennia is in any way normal or adequate.

And look, I’m not for a moment suggesting that the behaviour of Trump or his supporters is equivalent to the skill and wisdom of Ancient Greek lamenters, who held their grief consciously, expertly, and knew how and why it must be expressed. But I do think it’s at least possible that the “weirdness” Walz identified in the Trump movement is a perverted form of repressed grief.

Fellow Substacker Elias Crim draws a similar conclusion in his essay “Trumpism as Grief Culture”. Crim notes the many ungrieved losses Americans have faced in recent decades. He writes of the “culture of unacknowledged grief” in post-industrial America, which has absorbed “several decades of economic devastation, opioid overdoses, cultural demonization, and deaths of despair”, not to mention the mass deaths of Covid that have never been properly or publicly marked. (I want to add as a caveat here that of course, many American communities have suffered inconceivable losses and injustices and not turned to Trump. However, I don’t think that truth rules out the possibility that what we’re seeing here is at least in part repressed grief.) Crim writes:

Trumpism, this strange metapolitical phenomenon which has finally come to the surface of our public life, is a transmuting of grief, first into anger (the January 6 attack on the Capitol) and then into a new and celebratory form of community (the Trump rallies), bringing the closure which resembles tear-filled but happy singing at the wake just after the funeral.

For whatever world is coming next, we had better learn to understand this grief community. Especially by looking harder at—and facing up to—its origins.

Reading this, it’s hard not to wonder what might have happened if Solon hadn’t outlawed lament all those thousands of years ago. If he had tried to find some way to integrate grief into the democratic programme; into the structure we still live under. Grief is always weird, otherworldly, because it requires us to feel the truth of our powerlessness; how subject we are to forces much bigger than human. It opens the portal to the dead and the gods (even for nonbelievers, who will often find some wisp of faith in the midst of a bereavement). And when we stand in that portal to unfathomable swirling energies, and—critically—surrender to the pain and fear we feel there, we stand to gain some wisdom.

And wouldn’t some wisdom be welcome, right now?

Thousands of years ago, and at countless inflection points since, Western culture signed a devil’s bargain: a shrunken relationship with the full, weird, often terrifying and painful (and often miraculous and inconceivably beautiful) truth of this world, in exchange for the illusion of safety, of security, of order. The weird truth never went away, but for years we’ve told ourselves we were imagining it; that the weirdness is all in our own minds. And this restricted relationship with the gods and the weirdness of fate and with our own grief has made us susceptible to all kinds of human manipulations and power plays—susceptible, that is, to becoming both perpetrators and victims of these manipulations.

And it was always a crappy bargain anyway. The safety was only ever an illusion. We can never escape the weirdness and frightening mystery of existence. We can only try to repress and suppress it—and in so doing, we force it into a monstrous perversion, and deprive ourselves of its comforts and blessings.

At the end of “The Gender of Sound”, Anne Carson wonders “if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.”

It’s worth wondering.